Learning, Media and Technology

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Researching ‘learning lives’ – a new agenda for

learning, media and technology

Julian Sefton-Green & Ola Erstad

To cite this article: Julian Sefton-Green & Ola Erstad (2016): Researching ‘learning lives’ –
a new agenda for learning, media and technology, Learning, Media and Technology, DOI:
10.1080/17439884.2016.1170034

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Published online: 07 Apr 2016.

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 LEARNING, MEDIA AND TECHNOLOGY, 2016
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2016.1170034

Researching ‘learning lives’ – a new agenda for learning, media

and technology
Julian Sefton-Greena,b and Ola Erstada
a
Department of Educational Research, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway; bLondon School of Economics & Political
Science, London, UK

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

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In this article, we revisit the history of our interest in the term, ‘learning Received 15 March 2016
lives’ in order to explicate the meaning(s) of the phrase and to set up a Accepted 21 March 2016
series of challenges for research into young people’s learning. We
KEYWORDS
suggest that a learning lives perspective depends on three areas for Learning lives; everyday life;
investigation. First of all is the challenge of how to capture, theorise and digital technology; research
describe the travel and trajectories if researchers are truly to ‘follow’
learners through, around and in their learning across everyday life.
Secondly, it means refusing what seems to be the most apparent levers
of change, namely media and technology. And thirdly, learning lives
approaches need to address the pedagogicization of everyday life and
the schooled society. Learning lives approaches help us see the
changing place of the meaning of education and institutional
pedagogies across all the nooks and crannies of everyday life.

For the past 10 years, we have been both vexed and inspired by the idea of ‘learning lives.’ The phrase
has become a kind of totem for us hinting at a research agenda, a set of principles and values in edu-
cation including a critique of some of the dominant ways of approaching the relationships between
learning, media and technology. In this article – maybe polemic might be a more accurate word – we
revisit the history of our interest in this term in order to explicate the meaning(s) of the phrase and to
set up a series of challenges for research into young people’s learning.

Towards new critical agendas

In 2009, we noted that the most explicit academic use of the phrase ‘learning lives’ came from an
adult education project1 where the use of narratives produced by adult learners can shed light on
the place, purpose, impact and effect of education over time (Erstad et al. 2009). In the extraordinary
changes in educational research over the last 20 years, galvanised by the significant restructuring of
social and economic life across the societies of the global North (Ball 2007, 2008), this learning lives
approach seemed to offer a way of swimming against the tide of research which was inordinately
focused on the relationship of what happened inside schools to learning and pressures towards stan-
dardisation of learning outcomes (Hattie 2013). The sociocultural paradigm – the main alternative to
the non-cognitivist, psychologist tradition inspired by Thorndike (Ladwig 2010) – has always been
insistent that education is fundamentally a cultural construct, that it depends on changing definitions
of what it means to be educated (Levinson, Foley, and Holland 1996) and that school is only one site

CONTACT Julian Sefton-Green [email protected]

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 2 J. SEFTON-GREEN AND O. ERSTAD

amongst many where learning takes place (Scribner and Cole 1973). Yet, funding for projects which
examine learning in places other than school and understanding the role of learning as a lifelong, life-
wide project was and still is silenced from many policy debates and popular understandings about
how education works in our societies.
Both of our early work in media education was steeped in the new literacies tradition (itself
framed by socio-cultural principles) and in the 2009 article, we drew attention to the range of scho-
larship investigating the ever-changing place of digital technologies in young people’s lives where
school was clearly only part of the picture and any attempt to theorise what learning might mean
in relationship to technology had to take a much broader perspective. Not only were we intrigued
by the intra- and inter-personal dimensions of technology use, but we took from the adult education
narrative tradition a sense that learning was something that affected all aspects of how young people
were learning to live as well as the changing place of learning in their lives. As we wrote at that time:
The life-history approach is clearly consonant with some of the literacy location-based studies and draws atten-
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tion to the nature of social change; to inter- and cross-generational experiences; to the distinctness of types of
cultural change; and to the contexts of learner’s lives – both in their micro specificity, like the digital bedroom’
and larger spaces such as the family or institutional experiences. We are particularly interested in how learners’
narratives about themselves (both past and present) become resources which are then mobilised within the
learning process. (Erstad et al. 2009, 100)

It is not surprising that – especially in Ola’s case – we oriented towards the Germanic and Scandi-
navian traditions here, because the philosophy of Bildung – which animates both educational phil-
osophy and attitudes towards national education systems in those countries, is much more focused
on these kinds of whole-life, personal, values-driven and civically orientated impacts.

Specifying our research approach

By 2016, we had played with the learning lives idea sufficiently so that rather than focusing on its
origins in narrative, we were interested in exploring how we could ‘follow’ learners across spaces,
timescales and trajectories. In a forthcoming volume, Learning Identities, Education and Commu-
nity: Young Lives in the Cosmopolitan City, the idea of learning lives became a question of tracking
‘learning identities’ (Wortham 2005) over time and seeing how these ‘travel’ across different social
situations (Erstad et al. 2016). In this volume, we had set out to explore how everyday social inter-
actions for young people in a valley to the north-east of Oslo provided a range of different learning
contexts where they had developed different forms of learning identity (whether these are in online
gameplay, learning to cook, hanging out with friends on a sports field and so forth). Our initial ambi-
tion had been to track how these different identities were structured and constrained or enabled and
enhanced across all these different kinds of social setting and interaction. However, as the project
developed (2009–2011), learning lives came to mean something slightly different again.
We had deliberately set out to explore not just how forms of learning might circulate but what
function learning has – as an ongoing process – on learners. How the young people, who grew
over the two years of our fieldwork and whom we met at different stages in the life course (from
pre-schoolers to those just entering tertiary education or the workplace) drew on their emerging
sense of what their learning could do for them (and therefore what purpose education was seen
to serve), and this became a dominant theme. In the context of our fieldwork, the newly socially
diverse populations of a rapidly changing Norway, learning lives became a way to investigate ques-
tions of cultural identity, of Norway’s institutional response to its now racially diverse population, so
that our initial interest in contexts for and of learning mutated into a focus on the work that school
does amongst others in creating dimensions of national identity – of civic participation and identi-
fication. This was particularly acute when it came to understanding how people draw on versions of
what it is to be educated in order to imagine and to make futures for themselves. Paradoxically then,
the more we looked into ‘learning lives’ outside of the school, the more we were struck by the over-
whelming power of schooling in terms of how it frames knowledge as well as how it authorises
 LEARNING, MEDIA AND TECHNOLOGY 3

pedagogic relationships to the point where our initial interest in approaching all forms of learning
disinterestedly and agnostically did not hold up under scrutiny (Baker 2014; Bernstein 2000).

Conceptualising digital technologies, schools and learners lives

This recalibration in our approach was particularly important when trying to disentangle a focus on
learner identity – how individuals perform as learners within pedagogic frameworks – and on the
uses of digital technology in and out of school. In general, our learning lives interest stressed a neutral
approach to digital technology seeing it very much in the tradition of historical analysis of media
which have emphasised that, contrary to popular hype, there can never be not-media and that in
some ways, knowledge and learning are always structurally mediated (Buckingham 2000; Luke
1989). Our work showed very much how what may have been characterised as organic and ‘native’
digital media use is now simply an extension of the ways that the school society frames, categorises,
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and authorises knowledge penetrating ever more deeply into hitherto more private individual spaces.
In a similarly ‘learning lives’ inspired research project into the everyday lives of 13- to 14-year-olds
in a class from an ordinary London comprehensive school, one of us, Julian, has taken this agnostic
attitude into the everyday place of digital technology even further. In a co-authored volume, The Class:
Living and Learning in the Digital Age (Livingstone and Sefton-Green 2016), digital technologies were
seen to primarily serve functions of control. Within a school, technology supported processes of sur-
veillance and homogenised variety and difference, flattening out any theories of learning into standar-
dised measurable outcomes. At home, digital technology was regarded much like any other public
utility, water or electricity, a necessary unnoticeable part of the infrastructure. The technology both
enables form of connection and disconnection, especially as young people were taking care simply
to use it as yet another mechanism to avoid adult eyes. In this project, as with our joint work, the
most active process at work was the power of the school to define what constitutes appropriate
kinds of knowledge, ways of learning and pedagogic relationships; however, much traditional
forms of such dimensions might be redefined by the changing nature of Norwegian or British society.
However, this finding whilst on the face of it seeming to undermine the value of a ‘learning lives’
approach actually serves to support its need. Even if the evidence points to how both discourses of
learning and the uses of technology are only becoming ever more incorporated into singular narra-
tive dominated by the logic of formal schooling (Baker 2014), so that our initial interest in excavating
varied and diverse kinds of learning experiences – a sort of up-to-date digital version of Mike Rose’s
studies of older working class histories (Rose 2005a, 2005b) – seems not to have been proven in fact,
a lack of evidence is in itself worrying.
It was for this reason that the other of us, Ola, reviewed a range of Norwegian-based research,
most of it funded from an educational technology perspective with the aim of reasserting the
moral and social purpose of such work within a progressive vision for the purposes of education
in complex modern societies (Erstad 2013). That volume argued for the need to thread together a
response to social changes often exemplified by everyday digital technology use and the need to assert
key values around which a national education system could create both personal individual meanings
and civic solidarity. Key to the argument was a way of asserting a purpose for educational research
that goes beyond acting as a technocratic handmaiden to the ever more centralised and unequal
nation state. Unsurprisingly, it looked to a vision of learning lives research not so much because
such research could in and of itself demonstrate forms of learning and living counter and comp-
lementary to the work of the public education system, but because it enables researchers to examine
how lives are lived and how to orientate research to explicating and analysing values that count.
In an earlier volume, we suggested that focusing attention on learners and their lives conceptually
and empirically impacts on the analytical category of ‘learning’ itself (Sefton-Green and Erstad 2013).
As research into media, technology and education – as evidenced perhaps by many of the articles in
the pages of this journal – continues to pay attention to the role of media and technology as a mean-
ingful and determining variable in education, so paying attention to learning is left by the wayside.
 4 J. SEFTON-GREEN AND O. ERSTAD

This is not a sneer at the moral inadequacies of researchers, since attention to technology clearly
reflects wider social, and more importantly funding, priorities as has been eloquently argued by
others (Buckingham 2007; Selwyn 2010). However, we do suggest that bringing a learning life per-
spective to bear almost always requires research to address the key question of how to use knowledge
to make a better society. Refusing to exclude wider social contexts and learners’ life trajectories forces
these messy perspectives into the picture.

Areas for investigation

A learning lives perspective, we now think, depends on three areas for investigation. First of all is the
challenge of how to capture, theorise and describe the travel and trajectories if researchers are truly to
‘follow’ learners through, around and in their learning across everyday life. Disentangling the quo-
tidian and faithfully describing movements across timescales and social places (Leander and McKim
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2003) is complex, expensive and takes time: it is not necessarily calculated to appeal the current edu-
cation research funding regimes. Secondly, it means refusing what seems to be the most apparent
levers of change, namely media and technology. Whilst this might sound slightly perverse in the
light of our earlier work and in the pages of this journal, we would argue that a key problem for
those of us interested in technology is precisely to find a way not to overstate its importance and
to continue to find ways to show how it brings into play wider social and political questions of
power and meaning. And thirdly, learning lives approaches need to address the pedagogicization
of everyday life and the schooled society (Baker 2014; Tyler 2004). Learning lives approaches help
us see the changing place of the meaning of education and institutional pedagogies across all the
nooks and crannies of everyday life. Here, paying attention to the changing discourses of learning,
the new and ever more homogenising ‘folk theories’ (Olson and Bruner 1996) across our societies
(Biesta 2011) is, we suggest, necessary if we want to show how young people make sense of their
experiences of education and learn how to be, how to live, in an increasingly unjust and unfair
world (Putnam 2015). Without this sense of purpose, we would find it difficult to know what the
point of doing education research might be.

Note
1. See Gert Biesta’s project ‘Learning Lives: Learning, Identity and Agency in the Life Course’ (2003–2007).

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors
Julian Sefton-Green is currently Principal Research Fellow in the Department of Media and Communication at the
London School of Economics, and Associate Professor at the University of Oslo, Norway. He has published on
media education, new technologies, creativity, digital cultures and informal learning.
Ola Erstad is Professor and Head of the Department of Education at the University of Oslo, Norway. Working in the
fields of media and educational research, he has published on technology and education, particularly on ‘media lit-
eracy’ and twenty-first-century skills.

ORCID
Julian Sefton-Green http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9318-4934
 LEARNING, MEDIA AND TECHNOLOGY 5

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